The TinyURL.com service allows you to instantly generate short URLs from long ones. For example, a link to a long URL at Wikimedia Commons becomes http://tinyurl.com/2lp8q4. Each new URL submission is added to a database, and the next free alphanumeric string is set as an identifier.

Naturally, I had to try some rather amusing subsets of the range of alphanumeric possibilities. (Read: Offensive language ahead.)

The idea was to find a string of letters and numbers that had some linguistic or topical relationship to the target URL. Most of the things I tried led to boring test URLs (tinyurl.com/fuck) or expired pages (tinyurl.com/ass). But one seemed too good to be true: tinyurl.com/cunt led to the whitehouse.gov bio for Laura Bush.

It was unlikely to be chance. "Cunt" is often used as a pejorative term towards women, and Laura Bush is a female closely associated with one of the most hated people in America. It had to be a political statement. (I'm pretty sure that the URL is a political statement by the TinyURL administrator. The link has since changed to point to whitehouse.gov/mrscheney. TinyURLs don't change on their own.)